a new stepmum,’ Amanda said. ‘It’s only been a few dates, and I haven’t even met her. All I know is she’s called Kumiko and–’
‘Kumiko?’ Rachel said. ‘What kind of name is that?’
‘Japanese,’ Mei said, eyes laser-like. ‘Very common name.’
‘I’m not sure about that, but from what he says, she seems really nice.’
‘If she puts up with your allegedly American father, she must be?’ Rachel said, draining the last of her wine.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Amanda asked, but only got to ‘What’s that–’ when the football thumped her in the back of the head so hard she practically went face down into the picnic basket.
‘Sorry,’ said Mr Three O’Clock, leaning in dynamically to retrieve the ball.
‘What the fuck?’ Amanda said, hand on the back of her head, but she stopped when she saw Rachel laughing in her most attractive way, boobs pushed up like an offering.
‘Don’t worry about it?’ Rachel said. ‘She deserved it for telling porky pies?’
Mr Three O’Clock laughed and brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. ‘Is this picnic ladies-only or can any riffraff join?’
‘Riffraff would be an improvement?’ Rachel said. ‘Have some calamari? It’s Marks & Spencer’s?’
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said, sitting down roughly next to Amanda, knocking her Diet Coke into the grass. He didn’t apologise. Rachel was already dishing up a napkin of calamari for him.
Amanda was still holding the back of her head. ‘Olive oil?’ she asked, her voice flat.
‘Love some,’ he said, not even looking her in the face.
She carefully grabbed the bottle of oil and handed it to him, looking as innocent as she could manage. ‘Make sure you shake it first.’
He did.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Mei said.
To take his blade and cut into the pages of a book felt like such a taboo, such a transgression against everything he held dear, George still half-expected them to bleed every time he did it.
He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He’d never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no emails from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. The edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark – fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper – moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut.
And how they looked on the walls! Lined up according to whatever whim. George’s whim was simple – by author, chronological within name – but over the years he’d also done it by size, subject matter, types of binding. All of them there on his shelves, too many, not enough, their stories raging within regardless of a reader: Dorothea Brooke forever making her confounding choice of husband, the rain of flowers forever marking Jose Arcadio Buendia’s funeral, Hal Incandenza forever playing Eschaton on the tennis courts of Enfield.
He had seen a story once about sand mandalas made by Tibetan Buddhist monks. Unbelievably gorgeous creations, sometimes just a metre across, sometimes big as a room. Different colours of sand, painstakingly blown in symmetrical patterns by monks using straw-like tubes, building layer upon layer, over the course of weeks, until it was finished. At which point, in keeping with Buddhist feelings about materialism, the mandala was destroyed, but George tended to ignore that part.
What was interesting to him was that the mandala was meant to be – unless he’d vastly misunderstood, which was also possible – a reflection of the internal state of the monk. The monk’s inner being, hopefully a peaceful one, laid out in beautiful, fragile form. The soul as a painting.
The books on George’s walls were his sand mandala. When they were all in their place, when he could run his hands over their spines, taking one off the shelf to read or re-read, they were the most serene reflection of his internal state. Or if perhaps not quite his internal state, then at least the internal state he would like to have had. Which was maybe all it was for the monks, too, come to think of it.
And so when he made his very first incision into the pages of a book, when he cut into an old paperback he’d found lying near the rubbish bins behind the shop, it felt like a blundering step into his mandala. A blasphemy. A desecration of the divine. Or, perhaps, a releasing of it.
Either way, it felt . . . interesting.
He’d never considered himself an artist, certainly didn’t consider himself one now, but he’d always been a half-decent drawer of things. He could sketch a face with some skill – less so the hands, but who besides John Singer Sargent could ever do hands? – and he’d even, for a period in college, made nude charcoal rubbings of Clare, lounging over a pillow or failing to hold steady the feathered headdress she’d found God knew where. These were usually precursors to sex, of course, though none the worse for that, and perhaps an emblem of their eventual marriage, as she misunderstood the sort of person he essentially was.
‘That’s really not half-bad,’ Clare would say, looking over the sketchpad as she pulled his shirt out of his trousers. And what followed was always relaxed and amused and full of the right sort of joy.
He hadn’t stopped sketching and drawing when they married, even when he started the business and she began moving up the civil service solicitor ladder – she’d be a judge some day, they were both sure of it – but he’d never really progressed in the way Clare kept (nicely, encouragingly, full of hope) thinking he would. He remained a sketcher, and the nude charcoals grew fewer and farther between, the headdresses never found again, the languorous afternoons turning slowly, prematurely, into middle-aged naps.
Clare’s new husband, Hank, managed an enormous hotel for an American conglomerate. George had no idea if he drew.
After the divorce, George still sketched, sometimes nothing more than doodling while on the phone, sometimes taking sheets of the posher paper out of stock at the shop and trying his hand at a tree through sunlight or a rainy park bench or a heroically ugly pair of shoes Mehmet had once left behind after a failed audition for The Lion King. Nothing more than that, though. Nothing past lines of pencil, sometimes ink, never charcoal these days.
Until he found the book. He could easily have missed it. It had fallen behind the bins, and he only spotted it when he was gathering up the remains of a thrown-out lunch a lucky pigeon had dragged over half the alley. The book was a John Updike he’d never read (he’d never read any John Updike) called In the Beauty of the Lilies. He had taken it inside, in all its damaged state, and flipped through the ruined pages. Many of the edges were stuck together after having survived rainfall, but there was maybe half a workable book inside.
He was struck by an impulse to draw something on a page. The book’s life was over, it was effectively unreadable, but still, drawing on it seemed both tantalisingly vandalous but maybe also – and this felt increasingly right – a way to lay it to rest, give it
